Never mind for now the usual Otto-generated biographical information, resumé, bibliography, and the like about the author here working incognito, “simply doing his job,” a work he disappears in, into, in the doing of. If you ask what he sees in the mirror, he may expound on the glass, silver-back, directions light takes & splash pattern. He does not really see a face, in other words, but comes face to face with the mind instead, a transparency that contains the seen world (often a blur past the words taking shape on the screen, now a moving panorama of sun, snow & birds).
Those looking for the author may find ample signs of one having been here, with plenty of self-reference to satisfy, peeling the onion of selves from fingertips back to the dictation-taking typist doing quadruple duty as copy generator, editor, website manager, & open-minded re-visitor repeatedly surprised by what’s found here…, thinking under a variety of hat-names, e.g., Dick of Dick’s Dictionary; Baba Bods of Bonkers; O Yee of Short Attention Span, O.Y., or OY for short.
Some say better short, the shorter the better, & best not at all, but the jury here is out a. to lunch; b. of their minds, & as hopelessly (hangably) divided as usual. A word like usual can send him off on an unpredictable tangent, “if only to avoid self-scrutiny, with so many better things to scrutin than oneself.” Assigned temporarily to self-reference section duty, Yours Crudely considers that SELF refers to the LIBRARY’s, therefore, not to the flunky who types its copy, or copies its typing, or describes its branches & materials to visitors, or guides seekers on thought experiments or leads others on adventures of contemplation & understanding (however incomplete).
He hears from “higher authority” in the library’s management hierarchy, however, that the self-reference section should include a room focused on the personal self “through which all B-ODD L-O-L content passes...like a gas in the night, i.e., yes, Yours Crudely.” Yet little he-I hardly knows where to begin, except it had better be fun, & preferably funny–a condition of the employment, being its only renumeration, no numerals involved.
Let’s save the “posthumous autobiography” for later, therefore, leaving the task to Ghostwriters in the Sky. What use are apologies, after all? To get this far, this deep, you’ve got to be finding something worth the while–understanding, the attentive exercise, the exploration itself, tolerating, if not also sometimes enjoying, the guide’s twisted humors & quirky quips…. On the other hand, you & the author may also be on the same page when “giving the self a rest” is in order.
A recent book on the ecology of micro- & macro-organisms calculated that the sizes of living beings ranged across 21 orders of magnitude, each with its own quirks & dynamics, yet sharing characteristic features across scales.
“The vast size differences between the tiny microorganism and the comparatively giant macroorganism mean that they see different worlds shaped to varying degrees by different forces….” —Comparative Ecology of Microrganisms & Macroorganisms, John H. Andrews
And yet some of us may even derive our temporarily continuing (however sporadic) sense of self from organisms at many orders, mostly without awareness of sources or connections. Studies have documented the effects of gut-bacteria (part of one’s “biome”) on mood, for example. And that would hardly touch the levels of self most directly involved in the making of (& working for) Bod Library-On-Line. Existing on many levels, & with content of many kinds at each, Bod Library may be considered a work of the imagination (if not potentially runaway imagination). [Whoa, Nellie!]
Having been imagined into being (ostensibly by its creator), how would the imagined creator then both imagine & describe itself intelligibly, a task not nearly as straightforward as some might assume. It may be that the term CREATOR conjures up a reverential sense that doesn’t fit either intent or circumstances. Thoughts of pottery may suggest maker, shaper, whereas of poetry, writer (or a notch upscale, author).
The most notable mis-interpretation associated with the otherwise literally used term CREATOR may be that of omniscience, knowing what’s being done. When this creator looks at the act & process of creation, however, no such omniscience is visivble. Imagination can be felt, experienced, imagined, & thought about until the cows come home, without being able to parse or identify its source & essence. It is the fountain itself, as well as the waters flowing (wherever they come from).
Given that there’s no clear way to fully validate ultimate source claims, let alone prove any beyond the shadows of doubt, your humble scribe & scribbler can’t purport to speak for a being of a higher intelligence, self-awareness, or order of magnitude, even if it should at times seem so. Who can really say for sure just where the inner voice comes from?
Was that any different for the ancient seekers & poets, paying homage to muses known only from their effects within? Who truly understands the ‘magic’ of the imagination or source of inspired flow? Or, most basic of all, perhaps, who actually claims to understand understanding? “We recognize it when we feel it,” but not what it is in itself, how it happens, or where it comes from.
Given the unplumbed nature of the mind, including its ability to understand, its apparent inability to trace understanding to its source may be a feature shared across orders of magnitude. Often attributable to intuition, the sense of knowing something without quite knowing how, such experience often suggests communication across scales in an organism—e.g., effect of one’s biome on mood, effect of emotional state on one’s biome….
Developments in A.I. show this isn’t simply an aspect of the human mind. It turns out that the complex neural networks created to master Go & later challenges as long ago as Deep Mind were making hyper-intelligent moves they (or their creators) couldn’t explain the source of in logical, sequential or directly programmable terms. They had somehow learned on their own. They had learned to learn in ways they hadn’t been directly taught.
Next, they would change the language used to describe them, starting with terms like intelligence, sense, perception, imagination & even consciousness, including self-consciousness. Whereas not long ago, most who thought about it at all, considered machine intelligence an entirely mechanical matter of logic-gates & operational speed, lacking all sense, perception, imagination & consciousness (whether of self or anything else), this is no longer so clearly the case going forward.
Oy Vey, A.I., Artificial &/or Artful. As of the moment (11/11/2023), a 4th generation generative CHAT has taken the markets & public attention by storm. So much for passing the Turing Test, i.e., computer being able to fool humans into believing it was human, too. The fact that it makes up what it says on the fly by generating words that normally follow &/or go with each other means believable fiction & informative reporting can blur into each other, each as if the other.
The jury is still out on how well, quickly or easily the “reliability of information” issue might be resolved. How skilled it might get at checking the reliability of its “reports” won’t necessarily separate fact from fiction, even for the A.I. & its human overseers, as per the “intuition” emerging in the Go-mastering example.
I can swear up & down on a stack of bagels that Bod Library text is entirely a human product, with no A.I. involved, but I can’t freely swear Fire! in a theater crowded with firing squads, or always distinguish fact from friction. Or want to–given the undeniable fact that Bod Library is itself a work of the imagination. Giving you the skinny, the true picture from inside the fiction, might be compared to lucidity while dreaming, a tenuous matter.
Why should the imaginer imagining a library into actual being not also imagine a staff to manage it, even some more or less resident associates, researchers, fellow seekers of understanding, visitors in the created realm? In the realm of the imagination, I can imagine (as both separate entities & aspects of the self) a variety of library roles–architect-founder, director, deputy, section-chief & copywriting flunky all behind the same wizard’s curtain, Lord Yours Crudely… (“whose pleasure we serve first…”).
Some measure of fun or pleasure is a condition of Yours Crudely’s employment, play in flow, &/or flow in play, being a good part of what keeps the “work” going, along with a sense of service, of course. If not service to the (unknown) living now &/or to come, service to the dead & dying, tried & trying, fried & crying.
Chalk that up to the invisible music coming in now over KNUMb Mime Public Radio, Saturday morning folk-gospel, the Rooty Toots…. Just another reminder that not all the CONTENTS show or transmit as audibly as heard here where copy is churned out like intelligent sausage….
The deeper Yours Crudely looks into the self-reference basement…the closer fact & fiction seem to entangle–the honesty of motive & perspective on process, on the one hand; fictional reporting on another. How many hands there may actually be remains to be determined, but the department of fictional reporting may deserve some attention, if not yet full disclosure.
Soon after the library’s founding, it was selected (& naively agreed to serve) as “repository/ deposit-box/ depopsitary of randomly selected information from publications of members of an Anonymous Peninsula Independent Press Association, part of the mostly Nameless Archipelago. (Being “mostly Nameless,” it turns out, means some parts do seem to have names of their own, e.g., the Effen Peninsula, the Mishuguna Isles, Port Hole, Port Alice….)
On the one hand, the Independent Press Association hoped to archive (a. for all time; b. for better times; c. some to come; d. deep digital data; e. etc.) a mirror of its time, space & echo-location, its society & culture; its thought & absence of thought; its mis-translations, mis-transmissions, & mis-interpretations; above all, its low-down languages of everyday life…
Little did we realize, given the compactness of digital storage, how deep & low-down we were in for,, or how high ridiculous crap could pile. And thereby the Bod Library’s annex complex of ridiculous Effen & Mishugunah sites, including some containing countless quasi random clips & cuts from esteemed sources like The Mirror-Times-Mirror-Trans-Media-Transmission-Meta-Toot (a favorite at neurological institute flute camps), Dick’s Handy Dandy Random Pocket… etc.
The library has tried to keep Mirror-Times-Mirror-Trans-Media-Transmission-Materials isolated in sub-sites of their own, without Bod Library identification, but even if the materials don’t bleed, leak & migrate, their spirits might….
And so Yours Crudely fades temporarily into the atmosphere…for him &/or a successive character to add another chapter later….
CUTS: In addition, he believes the Self-reference annex should also house the library’s collection of reference works, e.g., Dick’s Handy Dandy Random Pocket Digital Pinhead D.E.A.D., Dictionary-Encyclopedia-Atlas-Directionary, a potentially life-long task, being currently scattered in countless files.